Is tabbed content okay or bad for SEO? Google takes both sides.
-
Hello Moz Community!
It seems like there are two opinions coming from directly from Google on tabbed content:
1) John Mueller says here that content is indexed but discounted
2) Matt Cutts says here that if you're not using tabs deceptively, you're in good shape
I see this has been discussed in the Moz Q & A before, but I have an interesting situation:
The pages I am building have ~50% static content, and ~50% tabbed content (only two tabs). Showing all tabbed content at once is not an option.
Since the tabbed content will make up 50% of the total content, it's important that it is 100% weighted by Google. I can think of two ways to show it:
1) Standard tabs using jQuery
Advantage: Both tab 1 and tab 2's content indexed
Disadvantage: Tabbed content may be discounted?
2) Make the content of the tabs conditional on the server side
website.com/page/ only shows tab 1's content in html
website.com/page/?tab=2 only shows tab 2's content in the html. Include rel="canonical" pointing to website.com/page/.
Advantage: Content of tab 1 indexed & 100% counted by Google
Disadvantage: Content of tab 2 not indexed
Which option is best? Is there a better solution?
-
You could display all of it and make some clever use of jump links. Just sayin...
-
EGOL: Makes perfect sense. This, IMHO, is a bad move by Google. They always say "Create for Humans, not Bots" but proper use of tabbed content does make for better UX. We are both eliminating tabs for rankings. Google as usual talking out of both sides of their mouth. Who wants to spend 5 minutes scrolling to the bottom of a ridiculously long page?
-
That happened to us too. We had a huge FAQ page and decided to reduce it's length by placing the answers behind tabs. It made the page neat, but, when that content went behind the tabs a lot of unique words were hidden. Previously that page received a lot of long tail traffic but after the diverse words were placed behind the tabs the long tail traffic collapsed.
-
EGOL is the man! We moved some content behind tabs, and our rankings did drop. When we moved it back out, they returned. We had some other issues/changes as well, so I can't 100% vouch for correlation.
One interesting test I did run is to run some searches for sentences that were hidden behind tabs on our site. The tabbed content was found, indicating that it was indexed by Google, so they aren't ignoring it.
We decided to go tabless, and I think we are the better for it, but who knows? If you have an enormous amount of content on a page, I would consider tabs, but I would leave the juiciest bits out in the open. FWIW.
-
Thanks for your input Egol! 9/10 times I would agree with your thoughts exactly and go with nothing hidden.
**Why not? **
The product has benefits that are described with completely different language to two target markets. The point of the tabs is to be able to effectively sell to people we know to belong to each market. So actually we don't need people to understand/use the tabs, they would exist merely to include our conditional content.
So anyways showing all content won't work well, and separate pages won't work either because of the way search goes for the niche. We'll see if I can get creative!
-
Yep. People argue about this stuff. The horses mouth even talks both ways.
So, if you hide your content behind tabs, you are gambling that Google is not going to respect that content today or tomorrow or at sometime in the future - even if they are doing differently now.
The only safe bet that I see is to display all of your content. So, I have bet ALL of my chips on zero content hidden in tabs. Zero content hidden in any way.
Showing all tabbed content at once is not an option.
Why not?
I don't use tabs for search engine reasons but I also don't use them to make sure that all of my content is out in the open for the visitor. Some people don't know about tabs. People who are old, have vision problems, are in a hurry, are not websavvy, are using a tiny screen, those people and many more have a good chance of missing your tabs.
I am getting all of my content out there for everyone especially Google. Google has hated hidden content since 1998. White text on white background might have been the first Google penalties.
**Which option is best? **
If you ask me, this is like one of those bad jokes, Door A or Door B and there is bad stuff behind both of them. If you think you know how Google treats them today you might be wrong and if you think you know how they will treat them tomorrow there is even a bigger chance that you will be wrong.
Is there a better solution?
Display all text. Search engines have always read it, probably always will read it. Do different at your own risk.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Too much content??
Hey Moz comm! My company is migrating all of our content manually from several subdomains into one new, unified subdomain next week. We will be uploading content at the rate of 15 blog posts/day or 75 posts/week--is it possible that we can get flagged by google for this, or is it always good to be adding lots of content? It's all quality stuff, but would they think we're spamming? Just wondering, curious to hear any insights or recommendations, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar0 -
How good or bad is this for SEO?
I will try to make this as clear as possible. We represent the yellow pages - www.visalietuva.lt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
For every single company that is listed we have Creditworthiness - that helps to find information about their payment history and their business status. It's pretty useful. An example could be found here: http://www.visalietuva.lt/en/company/dizrega-uab/creditworthiness Some companies that are proud of their result started putting Iframe on their pages:
http://dizrega.lt/lt/kontaktai/firmos-rodikliai We noticed this on Google Webmasters, when new links started to appear.
So we are not sure if this is good for SEO? Of course this is good for our Google Analytics:))
If this is good, maybe we should send offer for our clients, that we can help to put iframe like this for free, for people who are not able to do it themselves. Your opinions please!0 -
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? or this is like a good example by google
Can links indexed by google "link:" be bad? Or this is like a good example shown by google. We are cleaning our links from Penguin and dont know what to do with these ones. Some of them does not look quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bele0 -
SEO Tools for Content Audit
Hi i'm looking for a tool which can do a full content audit for a site for instance - Find pages which: • Lack text content. • Finds pages with lengthy meta descriptions • Finds missing H1 tags or multiple H1 tags . • Duplicate meta descriptions. • Find images with no alt text Are there any tools besides the ones on SEMOZ which can enable me to do a full content audit on factors like these. Or any SEO audit tools out there which you can recommend. Cheers, Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Google Experiment
Hi there, are there any implications for organic seo for implementing google experiment. Where you send users to a new page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How to get your company on the Google +, Right Hand side box of search results?
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-plus-content-replaces-ads/41452/ We have a Google plus page, but the results aren't coming up there Do you need a certain amount of people in your circles, what is the criteria to get your brand here? Any links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Website Restructure - Good or Bad for SEO?
Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing. I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with and would like some other professional feedback. Especially since their site isn't marketed very well. http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.) Website Restructure I agree we totally need to restructure our website. I have no idea what the previous SEO guy was thinking. The new SEO company is telling us that the structure is a big part of SEO. I don't believe so, but besides a little loss in 301 juice, is there any other downfalls? Are there any real benefits? Similar question asked the other day (and answered by me): http://www.seomoz.org/q/don-t-want-to-lose-page-rank-what-s-the-best-way-to-restructure-a-url-other-than-a-301-redirect
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Trupanion1